Antihumanism Movement/ The Afterlife

In the first half, innovator in the fields of aerospace and energy, Robert Zubrin, discussed the history of the antihumanism movement. He traced the movement to Thomas Malthus' ideas about population in the 18th century, to Paul Ehrlich's dire warnings about population growth in the 20th century (overpopulation is growing like a cancer, and our planet can't sustain it), as well as studies by the Club of Rome, a global think tank. Currently, powerful and unprincipled elites are behind genocidal population-control programs around the world, he contended. "The use of this kind of ideology...says that human beings are destroyers and basically have to be put under control or they're going to wreck everything and therefore, we the wise ones, must be in control," he continued.

Zubrin suggested that this kind of control has played out by stopping or discouraging technology that could be of enormous benefit to mankind, such as nuclear power. He further cited the banning of the pesticide DDT which was used to wipe out malaria (now 3 million Africans die each year from it), protests against enriched GMO foods which could save millions who die from vitamin deficiencies, and the reduction of industrialization under the guise of concern about global warming. He argued that environmentalists had been duped into this line of "fashionable" thinking which he compared to eugenics-- considered acceptable by many in the mainstream back in its day. Zubrin also talked about recent private space projects, and the need for the US to establish mining patent offices for space exploration such as on asteroids.

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In the second half, author, editor and columnist, Ptolemy Tompkins spoke of the treatment of the afterlife by major religious and philosophical traditions, as well as various models of death and rebirth featured in such works as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. One concept, he outlined, is that we are never wholly in our bodies to start with, and that we're part of a larger self (which could be thought of as the unconscious) which isn't "stuck down here at all" in the first place. Upon physical death, one of the big initial revelations is that you are still yourself, he noted.

"Before we are alive on Earth, we are alive in a larger way, and as we move down into this body," we suffer through a kind of amnesia in order to completely incarnate, he explained. We have to retrain ourselves to take the afterlife seriously, as people of the modern era are raised to believe that this idea goes against science, Tompkins commented. He also addressed different notions of hell, with one being a place where a person is lost and can't see the larger picture.

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Related Material

Zubrin Video Interview
In a video interview, Dr. Robert Zubrin joins Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch to discuss his new book, "Merchants of Despair," the difference between practical and ideological environmentalism, and how U.S. foreign aid policy encourages population control.